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This AI wants to sell you a pair of shoes

Humanity finally has access to profound artificial intelligence, AI pioneer Antoine Blondeau has told WIRED 2015 at London's Tobacco Dock – and it is already solving real problems -- like financial markets, sepsis infections, and... shoe sales. "This is first base, this is year one, decade one of AI," Blondeau said. "There are lots of things we can do going forward. We've just begun."

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Sentient's system is already working on an unprecedented scale in the civilian sector, Blondeau said, with two million CPU cores and five thousand GPU cards distributed across 4,000 sites worldwide. "No one had scaled AI to the level we were trying to scale it to [...] there is no theoretical limit," he said.

Sentient's first practical application for its AI system was financial, creating a "species" of AI trader that could compete, reproduce, die and eventually evolve to respond to changes in the markets on a level beyond that possible in human traders.

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Although building an AI capable of responding to every data point contained in the markets is virtually impossible, Blondeau said -- a recent calculation by the company estimated it would take the age of the Earth and a billion CPUs to search one percent of all data points generated by financial markets -- AI can help us get closer than ever to understanding that network.

Sentient has its eyes on other big problems too – for instance, finding an intelligent way to respond to sepsis infections, which kill 37,000 people in the UK every year at a rate greater than bowel cancer and lung cancer. "I can't imagine a better place to use data," Blondeau said. "It's about saving lives. It's about life and death."

There are things you cannot Google, increasingly more things. That technology solves this.Antoine Blondeau

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this nurse would always be on the clock, always on the lookout for you'." The nurse they eventually built, in partnership with MIT, collected data on 6,000 patients for a year and was able to use that "to predict the onset of sepsis ahead of time with more than 90 percent accuracy".

Sentient hinted that it is now working with Oxford University on genetic problems "brought about my biological evolution" that would take nature "billion" of years to solve, but that it can tackle in "weeks, months", Blondeau said.

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"One way to make AI smarter, better, is to increase the scale," he said. "There is no theoretical limit [...] but there is more to this."

Blondeau told WIRED2015 that the key to a big next step is to allow AI to "sense" more about the world, giving it access to visual, video, audio and other content so that it can more fully appreciate the context of information.

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The first practical area in which Sentient Technologies is looking to apply this concept is in retail; a truly useful AI system for online shopping would not just provide a list of recommendations, but be able to provide a rich, real-time dialogue with customers in the virtual world, just as you might experience with a well-trained customer assistant in a physical store.

The US retailer Shoes.com will be the first recipient of this tech, when it rolls out by the end of 2015, Blondeau said. Premiering a video of the tech in action, he demonstrated how the store will adapt as you browse through the catalogue, determining what you like without the customer having to explain why. "You cannot Googlefor that shoe," he said. "There are things you cannot Google, increasingly more things. This technology solves that."

For many the prospect of intelligence at this scale is worrying, with experts across the industry and public luminaries like Stephen Hawking often warning about the potential for its misuse in the future. Blondeau is aware of the dangers, but said there was much more good to come in the short to medium term than danger. "The ethical component is quite important," he admitted. "It's important that industry focuses on this, because we know that governments take a while to react to things and puts the right framework around it."

“[But] I do not believe for one second what we are doing is dangerous, we're not there yet, [...] but it's never too early to think about this."